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Bocaj (84920) writes "I recently spec'd out a large project for our company that included software from Red Hat. It came back from the CIO with everything approved except I have to use CentOS. Why? Because "it's free Red Hat." Personally I really like the CentOS project because it puts enterprise class software in the hands of people who might not otherwise afford it. We are not those people. We have money. In fact I questioned the decision by asking why the CIO was willing to spend money on another very similar project and not this one. The answer was "because there is no free alternative." I know this has come up before and I don't want to beat a dead horse, but this is still a very persistent issue. Our CIO is convinced that technical support for any product is worthless. He's will to spend money on "one-time" software purchases, but nothing that is an annual subscription. There is data to support that the Red Hat subscription is cheaper that many other up-front paid software products but not CentOS. The only thing it lacks is support, which the CIO doesn't want. Help?"Link to Original Source

You can get support for CentOS, but it comes in the form of a System Administrator. Either you'll need to hire one (if your company doesn't already have one), contract one part-time or hire them 'as needed' (billed as 'time & materials').

If you want to show the CIO that there are costs associated to CentOS put together a list of them. If the cost of these items are higher than the cost of support (either a support contract or purchasing Red Hat) then you'll be able to make your case.
* Hiring a full-

Web hosting is one thing. What we're doing is clustering, virtualization, NAS, databases, almost everything. We're going to run the entire company backbone off of this system. If it goes down, we go down. Out of my depth? Not really. I've been doing the GNU/Linux sysadm gig for a while now and I'm RH certified, but I am the only one. Having a support contract means that not only do I have backup if I do get in over my head, the support techs could probably walk one of the junior admins through fixing

Your last point is a good one, but has almost nothing to do with the difference between CentOS and RedHat. Your need for software did not go away, it was merely displaced to third-party tools. Failure to realize that is your boss's fault, not a problem with CentOS.

I've been in this exact situation and unfortunately the answer really is "it depends". You've hit all of the relevant points: you can afford it, you're the sole Linux support person, Linux is central to your business. Beyond that, you need to explain to your superiors that purchasing the RH support contract basically means funding security patches. Compare it to an anti-virus subscription on Windows. The fact that you're the only Linux support person still isn't a deal-breaker, though, since in-depth s